Think
of the time seventy years ago when Albert Einstein left Germany and came to
America. Germany was in the grip of Nazi dictatorship. Italy had a fascist government.
Bolshevist communism controlled the Soviet Union. France and Great Britain were
struggling with problems of colonialism. Yes, the United States of America was
then suffering from the Great Depression, but it was also a land of freedom
where people could think and express themselves freely.

The
columnist Thomas Friedman relates this situation to the life of Albert Einstein,
subject of a new biography by Walter Isaacson. Today, people are discussing
the economic threat from China, pointing out that China graduates more students
in math and science than the United States. Friedmans point - a good one
- is that a free society, not formal education, is the chief nurturer of creativity
that blossoms into new products and economic success. If Einstein were
alive today and learned science the boring way it is taught in so many U.S.
schools, wouldnt he have ended up at a Wall Street hedge fund rather than
developing theories of relativity for a Nobel Prize?, Friedman mischievously
asked.

Isaacsons
take on Einsteins life, wrote Friedman, is that it is a testimony
to the unbreakable link between human freedom and creativity. The whole
theme of the last century, and of Einsteins life, Isaacson said
in an interview, is about people who fled oppression in order to go places
to think and express themselves. Einstein runs away from the rote learning and
authoritarianism of Germany as a teenager in the 1890s and goes to Italy and
Switzerland. And then he flees Hitler to come to America, where he resists both
McCarthyism and Stalinism because he believes that the only way to have creativity
and imagination is to nurture free thought - rebellious free thought.

If
you look at Einsteins major theories - special relativity, general relativity
and the quantum theory of light - all three come from taking rebellious
imaginative leaps that throw out old conventional wisdom, Isaacson said.
Einstein thought that the freest society with the most rebellious thinking
would be the most creative. If we are going to have any advantage over China,
it is because we nurture rebellious, imaginative free thinkers, rather than
try to control expression.

In
the meanwhile, we should heed another of Isaacsons insights about Einstein:
He found sheer beauty and creative joy in science and equations ... What
Einstein was able to do was to think visually, Isaacson explained. When
he looked at Maxwells equations as a 16-year-old boy, he visualized what
it would be like to ride alongside a light wave and try to catch up. He realized
those equations described something wondrous in reality. By being able to visualize
and think imaginatively about science, he was able to see what more academic
scientists failed to see, which is that as you try to catch up with a light
beam, the waves travel just as fast, but time slows down for you. it was a leap
that better-trained scientists could not make because they did not have the
visual imagination.

My
favorite Einstein quotation, wrote Friedman, is that imagination
is more important than knowledge. A society that restricts imagination
is unlikely to produce many Einsteins - no matter how many educated people it
has.

How
does America measure up today in regard to encouraging or tolerating imagination
- a.k.a. deviant thought? Not too well. Political correctness is a direct damper
on free expression. In our schools, the political mania to increase test scores
has encouraged the practice of teaching to the test, which narrows
the course curriculum and diminishes the possibility that students will think
independently and follow their own interests.

The
acid test might be to ask whether Albert Einstein, had he been dictator of the
world, would have permitted anti-Semitic speech? Its possible,
even likely, that he would have done so.

What
Einstein Teaches us about China: A society that restricts imagintion will
have fewer giants of his sort by Thomas Friedman, New York Times. Star
Tribune, May 1, 2007, p. A11